April 2014 - Vol. 57 No. 4

The Internet Governance Ecosystem

Opinion From the President Apr 1 2014

Over the past decade, the Internet and its governance has become the topic of major discussion, debate, and controversy.

Vinton G. Cerf

Opinion Letters to the Editor Apr 1 2014

Code That Missed Mars

Gerard J. Holzmann's article "Mars Code" (Feb. 2014) demonstrated a nonblocking implementation of concurrent double-ended queues to not work through an application of Holzmann's own Spin model checker. However, the demonstration seemed too shallow.

CACM Staff

BLOG@CACM Apr 1 2014

Eyes Forward

Mark Guzdial considers why computing education lags behind other sciences, while Daniel Reed weighs balancing immediate research needs against future uncertainty.

Mark Guzdial and Daniel Reed

Using Patient Data For Personalized Cancer Treatments

News Apr 1 2014

Patient information databases eventually will help improve health outcomes and support development of new therapies.

Chris Edwards

Speech-to-Speech Translations Stutter, But Researchers See Mellifluous Future

model of gene regulation network in mammalian cells

News Apr 1 2014

The practical need for accurate instant or simultaneous machine translations continues to grow as applications multiply.

Paul Hyman

New Models in Cosmetics Replacing Animal Testing

U.S. Marine, Thai native, and CMU professor Alexander Waibel

News Apr 1 2014

A European law spurs scientists to develop computational simulations capable of predicting the toxicity of cosmetics.

Gregory Mone

MOOCs Revisited, With Some Policy Suggestions

Opinion Technology strategy and management Apr 1 2014

Assessing the rapidly evolving realm of massive open online courses.

Michael A. Cusumano

Thinking Outside the Continent

Opinion Global computing Apr 1 2014

Encouraging the opportunities for digital innovation and invention to flourish in a variety of social environments.

Michael L. Best

Opinion Kode Vicious Apr 1 2014

This Is the Foo Field

The meaning of bits and avoiding upgrade bogdowns.

George V. Neville-Neil

Opinion Viewpoint Apr 1 2014

Small Data, Where N = Me

Seeking personalized data-derived insights from analysis of our digital traces.

Deborah Estrin

Is Multicore Hardware For General-Purpose Parallel Processing Broken?

Opinion Viewpoint Apr 1 2014

The current generation of general-purpose multicore hardware must be fixed to support more application domains and to allow cost-effective parallel programming.

Uzi Vishkin

Is Multicore Hardware for General-Purpose Parallel Processing Broken?, illustration

Practice Apr 1 2014

Rate-Limiting State

The edge of the Internet is an unruly place.

Paul Vixie

Major-League SEMAT: Why Should an Executive Care?

Practice Apr 1 2014

Becoming better, faster, cheaper, and happier.

Ivar Jacobson, Pan-Wei Ng, Ian Spence, and Paul E. McMahon

Practice Apr 1 2014

Multipath TCP

Decoupled from IP, TCP is at last able to support multihomed hosts.

Christoph Paasch and Olivier Bonaventure

Who Does What in a Massive Open Online Course?

Research and Advances Contributed articles Apr 1 2014

Student-participation data from the inaugural MITx (now edX) course — 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics — unpacks MOOC student behavior.

Formally Verified Mathematics

Who Does What in a Massive Open Online Course?, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Apr 1 2014

With the help of computational proof assistants, formal verification could become the new standard for rigor in mathematics.

Jeremy Avigad and John Harrison

Unifying Functional and Object-Oriented Programming with Scala

Formally Verified Mathematics, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Apr 1 2014

Scala unifies traditionally disparate programming-language philosophies to develop new components and component systems.

Martin Odersky and Tiark Rompf

Security and Privacy For Augmented Reality Systems

Research and Advances Review articles Apr 1 2014

AR systems pose potential security concerns that should be addressed before the systems become widespread.

Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno, and David Molnar

Technical Perspective: A ‘Reasonable’ Solution to Deformation Methods

Security and Privacy for Augmented Reality Systems, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Apr 1 2014

Jacobson et al. construct a deformation method that allows a wide range of handle types (points, line segments, open and closed polygons) and produces deformations that are biharmonic functions.

Joe Warren

Bounded Biharmonic Weights For Real-Time Deformation

Research and Advances Research highlights Apr 1 2014

Changing an object's shape is a basic operation in computer graphics. Our goal is to make the design and control of deformations simpler by allowing the user to work freely with the most convenient combination of handle types.

Alec Jacobson, Ilya Baran, Jovan Popović, and Olga Sorkine-Hornung

bounded biharmonic weights, illustration

Opinion Last byte Apr 1 2014

Future Tense: Re: Search

For some, data collecting will always be more rewarding than data mining.

Ken MacLeod